Films
Women Made Up 15% of the Protagonists in the Top 250 Grossing Films in 2014
A warning: if you’re still reeling from the profoundly disappointing news that 100% of this year’s eight Oscar-nominated feature films are about men, this post is likely to make you even more...
January 2015 Film Preview
January is widely considered to be a dumping ground for bad movies, but there’s actually an embarrassment of art-house riches to be found this month in theaters, from Oscar vehicles to impressive...
Chicken & Egg Pictures Gives $330,000 in Grants to 18 Women-Directed Projects
In anticipation of its 10-year anniversary next year, Chicken & Egg Pictures has chosen 18 documentaries to receive $330,000 in funding. Fourteen new films were selected as part of the 2014 Open...
December 2014 Film Preview
Decembermight be cold and snowy, but the month’s wide range of films is worth venturingout to the theater to see. Starting strong on December 3, the comedy Zero Motivation follows a unit ofIsraeli...
It’s Official: Michelle MacLaren Will Direct Wonder Woman
After weeks of rumors, we now have official confirmation that Michelle MacLaren will develop and direct the Wonder Woman movie, which is scheduled for release in Summer 2017. This is great news on a...
Women in Film Announces Nine Finishing Fund Recipients
The Women In Film Foundation has announced the nine female directors and producers who will receive finishing funds this year. In its 29th year, the fund will provide cash grants and in-kind...
Kristen Stewart, Kate Winslet, ‘Frozen’ Director Jennifer Lee Among Mentors for ‘Twilight’ Short Film Contest
As anyone with a glancing familiarity with Bella and Edward knows, the Twilight fandom is powerful, passionate, and legion. A new short film contest called “The Storytellers — New Voices of...
Essence Holds Second Annual Shorts Competition for Black Women Filmmakers
Private Video on Vimeo
November 2014 Film Preview
The month of November arrives under thesign of the Mockingjay, promising the keenly anticipated return of KatnissEverdeen to our screens in The HungerGames: Mockingjay — Part 1. The hype has...
Dear WB, Consider Hiring These Women Writers and Directors for Your Wonder Woman Movie
Yesterday, Warner Brothers did what studios do these days: announce superhero movies and spin-offs. This announcement was a little different than the usual proceedings, though, because among the 15...
Gamora and Wonder Woman to Get New Comic-Book Series
Neither Marvel nor DC, the two powerhouses that dominate the comics industry, has a great track record at gender diversity. According to 538, female characters account for only about one of four...
October 2014 Film Preview
October may be the time of ghosts and ghouls, not that you’d know it from the many diverse film offerings made by and starring women this month. But we definitely start with one ghoul: the one in...
Women in Film, Indiegogo, and the Black List Launch New Award for Young Female Filmmakers
When it comes to fostering female directing talent, support and mentorship can’t come soon enough. To that end, a group of producers, media companies, and film organizations have come together to...
Digital Bolex Grant for Women Cinematographers Now Receiving Applications
Cinematography is one of the film industry’s least equal fields. In the last five years, women accounted for just 3% of all cinematographers among the 250 top-grossing films. In what might be the...
Supergirl Coming to TV
Superheroes haven’t just taken over the multiplex, but the Huluplex too. Debuting this fall are Fox’s Gotham and NBC’s Constantine, which will join CW’s The Flash (in its first season) and...
Jessica Chastain Wants More Female Protagonists: “Where is the Scarlett Johansson Superhero Movie?”
After Zero Dark Thirty and The Help, we don’t need any more reasons to love Jessica Chastain, but she’s giving us another one anyway. On a press tour for The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby,...
September 2014 Film Preview
Froman exclusive Manhattan girls’ prep school where the teachers may or may not bedrinking the blood of their students, to a woman abandoning city life to trek1,700 miles across the Australian...
Some Links To Check Out From Vacation
Happy September. Hope you got some time off. We’re getting ready to share lots of interviews with women directors at the Toronto Film Festival. I’ll be reporting from there. For up to the...
Watch: “Women in Refrigerators” Supercut: Female Characters Killed to Give Male Characters Depth
The recent release of a “women in refrigerators” supercut is an infuriating reminder — as if you needed one — of how female characters are (under)utilized and (under)valued onscreen....
Crosspost: Where’s Gamora?
The following is crossposted from the author’s site with her permission. After seeing Guardians of the Galaxy, my four-year-old daughter wanted a Gamora action figurine and my son wanted...
Watch: Actual Superheroine Can’t Get a Movie Made About Her in Hollywood
Angelfire is a superheroine who knows her worth. And that worth? The center spotlight in a movie all about her — not as a sidekick, a recurring pair of boobs, or a sacrificial love interest to...
Marvel Chief Says He Wants a Female-Led Superhero Movie… Just Not Right Now
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige knows there’s a groundswell of support for a superheroine movie. He also knows that films with female protagonists can make boatloads of money. And he most...
August 2014 Film Preview
The summer blockbuster movie season may be winding to an end, but the multiplexes offer a refreshingly diverse selection of films by and about women for August. The month blasts off (literally) with...
Princess Leia and Orphan Black to Get Their Own Comic Books
The 47% of comic-book readers who are female have something new to celebrate: Princess Leia and Orphan Black are coming to newsstands. At San Diego Comic Con, Marvel announced that the first of...
Chicken and Egg Launches New Fund for Women Documentarians from India
Chicken and Egg Pictures, the nonprofit film fund dedicated to incubating socially conscious documentaries from female filmmakers, has partnered up with the Indian Documentary Foundation to launch a...
Women in Animation Rolls Out Mentorship Program
Women in Animation has launched a pilot program in Los Angeles that’ll match neophytes in the field with industry professionals for one-on-one mentorships lasting six months. The nonprofit...
Women in Film and Television International Seeking Shorts for Female Filmmaker Showcase
In celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2015, Women in Film and Television International (WIFTI) is soliciting films by women directors from all over the world to feature in its...
Canadian Film Org Launches Mentorship Program for Women Directors
Canada’s largest artist-run film production and education organization, the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT), has launched an intensive five-month mentoring program for women...
Fox Launching Mentoring Program for Women Directors
Fox exec Nicole Bernard will spearhead a new initiative aimed at hiring more women directors at the film and TV studio. The Fox Global Directors Initiative will recruit twenty candidates for a...
Chicken & Egg Awards 23 Follow-Up Grants; Places Open Call for New Projects
Chicken and Egg Pictures, the only nonprofit film fund devoted solely to supporting women documentary directors, has announced that it will endow follow-up grants to 23 ongoing feature-length...
Lupita Nyong’o Becomes 2nd African Woman to Land Vogue Cover
Scroll down for the full Vogue cover. A couple of weeks after the announcement that she’d optioned Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Lupita Nyong’o has graced the cover...
Women Directors Win Majority of Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund Grants
Female filmmakers make up the majority of the 2014 recipients of the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund, a grant devoted to supporting domestic and international projects with a social mission. The...
Lupita Nyong’o is Going to a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Earlier this week, it was announced that Lupita Nyong’o will be joining the cast of Star Wars: Episode VII. This is big news one of Hollywood’s biggest fantasy epics, which has been told...
June 2014 Film Preview
With only one movie with a female protagonist opening wide, June will be a lean month for women at the multiplex, even by Hollywood standards. Despite not being a feminist, Shailene Woodley will...
Submit Your Film to the Athena Film Festival
The Athena Film Festival is currently accepting submissions until September 15, 2014, for its sixth annual event. Located at Barnard College in Manhattan, the Athena Film Festival is an engaging...
Guest Post: How to Carry the Collaborative Spirit into the Realm of Distribution
Last summer, filmmakers David Lowery, Destin Cretton, AdamWingard and Joe Swanberg discovered that all of their movies were hittingtheaters and VOD on or around the same date. In this competitive...
Want a Princess Leia Action Figure? Sorry, Disney Doesn’t Sell Them
One of the implicit promises of the sale of the Star Wars franchise to Disney was that its universe would become more inclusive. Big Mouse is a genius at merchandising, after all, and movies have to...
Quote of the Day: Elle Fanning on Female Characters
In a recent interview for FASHION Magazine, the ultra-talented Elle Fanning discussed the limited roles available to women: There are still a lot of movies where women are dependent on the guy. We...
Guest Post: For Female Indie Filmmakers, The Woman-Child Wins: Obvious Child and Zero Motivation
As readers of Women & Hollywood, you’re fully aware of the bleak statistics concerning women working in the film industry, onscreen and behind-the-scenes. In spite of those incredible odds,...
Cartoon: The Trouble With Wonder Woman
Crossposted from Dorkly.
May 2014 Film Preview
If you’re lucky enough to live in a city with several arthouse theaters, May is a veritable banquet of indie and foreign gems by and about women. And if your choices are limited to the multiplex,...
5 Reasons Why Those Star Wars Casting Rumors about Lupita Nyong’o Are Worth Celebrating
Let me put all my cards down on the table. I want Lupita Nyong’o to succeed beyond her wildest dreams. I want her to enjoy a career like Jessica Chastain’s — another actress who was...
Still No Plans for a Marvel Superheroine Movie
Here are all the upcoming movies that have been announced from Marvel from now until 2018: Captain America 2, Captain America 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, The Amazing Spider-Man 3, and The Amazing...
March 2014 Film Preview
This year’s March Madness comes courtesy of the Veronica Mars movie, which will receive a day-and-date release on March 14. Kristen Bell’s noir detective, now a decade out of high school,...
SXSW’s New Gamechanger Award to Help Fund Women-Directed Films
Men and women may enter film school at the same rate these days, but 90–95% of the directing jobs in Hollywood still go to male filmmakers. Gamechanger Films is one of the many players trying to...
Six Women-Directed Projects to be Funded by Tribeca Film Institute
Concussion director Stacie Passon, TV writer Colette Burson, and documentarians Heather Courtney and Anayansi Prado were among the filmmakers chosen to participate in the Tribeca Film Institute’s...
2014 Athena List of Best Unproduced Screenplays with Strong Female Protagonists Announced
We need more female protagonists. According to a study by the Center for the Study of Women in TV and Film, only 11% of the top 100 grossing films in 2011 featured girls and women as main...
New Fellowship for Women Playwrights Announced
New York City’s Drama League and Broadway director Michael Mayer have announced the creation of the Beatrice Terry Fellowship. The fellowship will support the development of an original work from...
Women and Hollywood February 2014 Film Preview
There’s only a smattering of films directed, written, and about women on offer this upcoming month, but there’s a few gems in the mix, as well as a great deal of variety in quality and...
Female Filmmakers Launch Middle Eastern Film Fund
Director Jessica Habie and journalist Deema Dabis have announced a new film fund in support of Middle Eastern cinema. The Fajr Falestine Film Fund is devoted to the “production of groundbreaking...
Hunger Games: Catching Fire Will Be Top Grossing Movie of 2013, Frozen Surges to #4
All hail Katniss, Anna, and Elsa. The heroines of Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Frozen, introduced to us all the way back in November, have started off the new year still kicking box-office...